She is going to say ‘skin’, but she stops herself just in time.

I start a third slice.

‘Sorry,’ she says, gathering up a little chunk of pastry that has fallen on to the floorboards, before shoving it, unthinkingly, into her pocket, ‘that was …’

Tactless?

Yes. Yes it was.

‘Kimberly suffered 78 per cent burns,’ I say, through a giant mouthful. ‘People rarely survive with even a fraction of that percentage. But there was a South African doctor working at the hospital she was taken to in Derry. He was a burns specialist and a plastic surgeon. He shouldn’t have been there – I won’t bore you with the details …’ (Or myself, for that matter.)

I cut another slice. ‘I mean he was meant to be in Singapore. He was on a lecture tour. But then the toddler of the couple he was B&B-ing with ate two pages of his passport. And Kimberly shouldn’t have been there, either, come to that; her flight had been cancelled the day before. The ambulance driver suffered a seizure and the assistant driver who took over the wheel – and received a formal warning, after the fact, for his trouble – got lost. But if she’d …’

I pause. It’s such a convoluted story. Yet Miss Hahn seems rapt.

‘We worked out afterwards that there were approximately twelve or thirteen coincidences which all led, en masse, to her ultimate survival. If any one of them hadn’t taken place …’ I pause. ‘All these strange coincidences – a comedy of errors, one after the other. We often laughed about it.’

‘What a beautiful story,’ she says, somewhat fatuously, as I cut my fifth slice. ‘And what a sad story,’ she adds, carefully, as an afterthought.

‘She survived another twelve years,’ I say.

Was it twelve years? Suddenly that doesn’t seem very long at all.

‘She survived for a reason.’ Miss Hahn nods.

‘And every day – every day – she wished that she hadn’t,’ I continue. ‘Every day she wished she’d just died in that fire. Every day she cried – with the sheer frustration of it all. I mean the pain she was in. She was virtually blind. This incredible … inconvenience; the sheer … sheer effort … the laboriousness of a life with severe burns. The infections. The ulceration. Some of the scars never fully healed. On those pressure-points of the body: the elbows, the buttocks …’

I gaze down at the pink pork-meat, then over at Miss Hahn’s crimson hands. Miss Hahn is also gazing down at her hands.

‘And when people say things like … like … “She survived for a reason” …’ I throw out my arm and another small chunk of pastry ricochets off the hood of the oven (Miss Hahn goes to retrieve it). ‘For a reason! I just think – no harm intended, of course – I just think: You misguided bloody idiot, you cliché-toting well-meaning but misguided bloody idiot. You sanctimonious fool. You moron. I mean how dare you simply presume to …’